Suilven

When you first catch sight of Suilven, normally from the small village of Elphin on your way up through Assynt to Lochinver, you can’t help feel a little unsettled. Its monolithic, shark-like structure sits looking out to sea, quite alone from the surrounding mountains, giving it a brooding sense of solitude. It’s as if nothing else in the area wanted to go near it for fear of being devoured. Suilven perpetually generates some foreboding cloud systems as the winds sweep in from the Atlantic, adding to its visual ferocity.

The logistics of this project have been challenging to say the least. Its remoteness, steepness, changeable weather and surrounding boggy terrain all make Suilven a difficult fortress to penetrate. We embarked on the project by climbing Suilven’s surrounding mountains so that we could film and survey it from all angles and work out the best way to attack it when the time came. It turned out all the surrounding mountains came with their own unique challenges, especially in the heart of the Scottish winter.

Without a doubt Suilven is one of the most amazing objects Scotland has to offer and we hope that our short film will inspire others to venture out to experience the grand splendour of the environment for themselves.

Filmed, coloured and edited by James Anderson and Niall Walker from NorthColour Films. Original Soundtrack by Giles Lamb